1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methodologies for extracting data from data sources on a network and particularly to, methodologies for service oriented data extraction and data transformation.
2. Description of Background
Before our invention, large business enterprises typically implemented a plurality of dissimilar data sources within their operational networks, in addition to interacting on a daily basis with a wide variety of external business sources (such as business transactions or structured data acquisition processes). The sharing, acquisition, transformation, and migration of managed data comprises significant costs that are associated with such activities. Incorporating new data feeds, or enabling new business transactions is usually a costly and lengthy process. Once a business enterprise has decided on a specific product, or product line for data management, it is often very difficult to migrate to a simpler, better, or more cost effective solution because of configuration differences between the existing and proposed data schemas.
Automated tools that are utilized for managing a business enterprise's data efficiently are a necessity in today's business environment. One classification of tools that is frequently used are stand-alone proprietary data transformation and schema mapping applications. Such tools are used to provide a configurable data transformation processes for data migration, sharing, and reporting, in addition to performing mapping operations for business transactional operations. These tools provide the means to achieve their configuration goals provided they are compatible with both the source and the destination data sources, in addition to being compatible with the available operating environment. While such automated tools provide valuable functionality, they remain proprietary; and further, they lack the flexibility and adaptability needed in today's business environment.
Therefore, there exists a need for a flexible service oriented solution to reduce the overall cost that is associated with data migration, sharing, reporting and mapping.